Compilation source: RICH, J. Outsourcing Bureau to Evade Accountability: How Public Servants Build Shadow State Capacity. American Political Science Review, 1-16.

2025/05/2401:26:36 news 1658

How bureaucracy avoids being held accountable

Summary:

Existing research generally believes that more accountability systems should be adopted to solve the problem of weak bureaucratic capabilities in developing countries. This article shows how accountability initiatives aimed at reducing corruption can actually hinder the development of competent government agencies by making it harder for agency leaders to recruit experts and spend budgets. This further highlights the common way officials evade accountability that limits their effectiveness: outsourcing government agencies to non-state organizations. This practice of outsourcing bureaucracy to avoid accountability creates what is called “shadow” state capacity, paradoxically, it may help explain the “pocket of effectiveness” in the social plans of governments in developing countries. Based on in-depth interviews and descriptive statistics, this study demonstrates how outsourcing plays a key role in two of the social sector projects that are most supported by Brazilian . However, the authors argue that bureaucratic outsourcing may ultimately limit state capacity even if it helps to build competent projects in the short term.

Author Profile:

JESSICA A. J. RICH, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Marquette University,

Compilation Source:

RICH, J. (2022). Outsourcing Bureaucracy to Evade Accountability: How Public Servants Build Shadow State Capacity. American Political Science Review, 1-16.

Author of this article: JESSICA A. J. RICH

The main point of this article

Weak national capabilities are the root cause of development challenges in many developing countries. In the previous literature on bureaucratic competence and accountability systems, one of the reasons for weak state capacity is that officials in developing countries are more motivated to maintain their wealth and power rather than leveraging the power of the state to promote broader development goals. This problem requires the establishment of accountability systems to combat corruption, including the establishment of state institutions, which hold other public institutions and government departments responsible for compliance with the law; arrangements for new procurement regulations and civil service examinations require the control of the way of spending the bureaucratic structure and their employees; strengthening the power of audit agencies, etc.

However, despite the global promotion of accountability, the bureaucratic capabilities of developing countries are still significantly uneven, even within the country. While quantitative measures of bureaucratic competence are often positively correlated with quantitative measures of accountability, existing studies have also revealed numerous exceptions and unexplained cases.

This study directly faces the problem of obstacles caused by accountability to the development of bureaucratic capabilities. It focuses on the compliance burden mechanism in the field of public administration in “red tape” related research, referring to the total resources the institutions spend in compliance with rules (Bozeman, Feeney, 2011). In practice, the challenges of corruption and compliance burdens are interrelated. Anti-corruption initiatives maintain scrutiny by forcing officials to comply with complex accountability rules. But officials who comply with these rules must pay a heavy compliance cost. For this reason, bureaucratic outsourcing in the "new public management" governance approach is highly favored when officials are looking for ways to evade accountability and reduce the cost of compliance.

In this article, the authors show that the trend of “new public administration” has prompted policy makers to outsource not only local authorities that implement policies, but also core national institutions that outline and regulate policies. Based on 41 interviews conducted over six months of field work, this study first reveals the unexpected consequences of Brazil’s accountability reform: the potential to kill the various “red tape” of social sector plans. Then, using two cases of Bolsa Família and the AIDS program, my argument on bureaucratic outsourcing was plausible and provided evidence that these two programs represent a broader national model: the heads of state institutions outsource the administrative operations of their own national government agencies to non-state actors such as UNDP , UNESCO, as a strategy to avoid anti-corruption regulations. By breaking down the work of government agencies into discrete “projects” and subcontracting non-state organizations to manage these projects, the head of an agency can evade government regulations on recruitment and procurement rather than follow the rules of their subcontractors.And this evasion strategy helps to build competent government programs in the short term, but there is still a policymaker who can outsource bureaucracy for partisan or personal purposes, which will negatively affect bureaucracy’s capacity development. The conclusions of this article call for the need to develop a research agenda that explores the motivation of policy makers to outsource bureaucracy as a strategy to evade accountability rules under the national legal framework that manages bureaucracy and to explore more broadly the conditions for institutionalizing outsourcing institutions into competent government bureaucracies.